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Power ranger

All this is great stuff but not quite enough to stir my nerdy loins. The Samsung Series 7 Chronos’s performance in the Futuremark benchmarks was good without being class-beating, and the Powermark automated battery test suggested a fairly average battery life of 125 minutes between recharges.

Benchmark Tests

PCMark 7 results

Longer bars are better

A long battery life is supposed to be one of the Chronos’s big attractions so I don’t know why Powermark doesn’t back this up. It’s not as if much power is being wasted as heat since the computer never gets more than slightly warm after intensive use.

Samsung’s understated logo makes its competitors look vulgar

Perhaps my tweaking of the graphics drivers to stop the benchmark crashing had a side-effect of disabling some of the power-saving triggers. Certainly, every time I started a video or played a game, the fan kicked in and stayed running until I stopped the video or quit the game. The fan is not particularly noisy but it was distracting when I was playing one video after another.

Talking of noise, the speakers produce enough volume to be heard clearly in a meeting room. Yes, the sound is tinny, but all notebook speakers are tinny.

Verdict

The Samsung Series 7 Chronos is a great notebook that offers a lot of the kinds of thing I tend to harp on about, such as a big screen, a full keyboard, USB 3.0 ports and a multi-touch trackpad. With so many competitively priced notebooks around, you might baulk at paying close to a grand for a product that is not particularly thin or light, but it looks well designed, is well thought-out and well built. It is also extremely comfortable to use – and surely this is the critical buying factor for a general-purpose notebook. ®